Funny but true: Rockstar Games' thoughts on social networking

I find this spoof website of theirs entitled MyRoom, from Grand Theft Auto IV, quite funny. The fact that they poke fun at our society is, is what makes me play GTA often.

I often find Jack Thompson and his followers' opinions about the series as rather bollocks; sure, they have a point regarding the apparent risks of underage kids playing violent videogames, but the fact that school shootings are merely exaggerated by yellow journalists such as Faux, er, Fox News, and overzealous bigots cash in on the GTA craze, made me think that they're getting too far, although I do cite Hot Coffee as purely R*'s fault, since they unwittingly left the offending code, and ended up wasting a large sum of money just to fix the mess they made.

OK, enough yada-yada, here's a witty excerpt from MyRoom.com, which as you may notice while playing the game, is a thinly veiled parody of MySpace. I'm sure this one applies to them teeny-boppers and newbies to the internets out there:

Tips for creating the perfect social networking page:

Express yourself with a garish multicolored background. Your page should be as ugly and distracting as possible. Make it look like a peacock ate a crayon box and crap on the internet.

Use a font color that is as similar to the background color as possible. The idea is that people should feel physically nauseated after reading a couple of sentences.

Cover the page with seizure-inducing glitter graphics.

Post pictures of celebrities and that you have found on the internet. [insert social networking site] positively encourages mass-copyright infringement.

Set up embedded music files that launch at maximum volume as soon as somebody clicks on your page. Include ones with lots of profanity.

Write crappy poetry and add some cheesy quotations like "live each day as if it were your last".

Make identity theft easy by listing every single piece of personal information you can think of, including birthday, address, phone number, mother's maiden name, first pet's name and social security number. Then wonder why a creepy man is shooting loads on your bedroom window.

Write down every last detail of your sordid little existence so that future employers have a full history of your sexual promiscuity and drug use.

Remember to spend every spare minute tweaking your profile. You are SO important!

So I got my hands on a pair of these units from a friend of mine who was generous enough to donate for free. While getting these in-store demo units to work as a retail device is a pain and a half to do (more on that in a later post), I've had fun modding and poking into the internals to see what can be done with it. There are actually a LOT of hidden and/or dummied out features in the tablet, most of which can be accessed through the open-source Activity Launcher.
For instance, LeapFrog dummied out access to the lock screen settings by removing menu references to said options in Settings. They disabled the AOSP lock screen presumably to save children the (supposed) frustration of having to unlock their device upon using it. It is however possible to re-enable it and add a lock pattern or a simple slide…

Felt like sharing this as most of them South Asian GSM bloggers are, suffice it to say, being scrooges or something, asking for $$$ to have the firmware package's password to be unlocked as a rather low-brow way to earn money. Not that I have anything against them, mind you, but as I said on my previous post, this business model of theirs only serves to inconvenience both clients and technicians alike.
I dumped this off my Galaxy S7 clone, a few weeks or so after I got the phone off the service centre when they repaired it as I made the unfortunate mistake of flashing the wrong ROM. It should work with certain Galaxy S7 replicas using preloader_gxq6580_weg_l.bin as the preloader; mine's the one with the plastic frame and the microphone pin on the wrong side of the device. Firmware info: CPU: MT6580 SW:0000 Ver: CA00Downloading Boot8 ...EMMC Size: 0x01C3000000Flash Type: EMMCINT/EXT RAM Size: 0x0+0x0Reading infr(EMMC)...id:Z6U030HA_V105Enversion:5.1model:gxq6580_weg_lbrand:alp…

Let me say first that while I've been into the Hackintosh scene for like seven or eight years, I am still learning the ropes with some aspects such as DSDT and a few other things. But let me share this install guide for you lads and lasses who are interested in cobbling up a Hackintosh of your own. This guide is mostly based on Elad Nava's El Capitan installation guide, albeit with a few tweaks to account for the new OS and system to be installed on, assuming that you're on a G3258-based system. In my case, I am using a PC with the following specs: ASUS H81M-D (BIOS revision 2204)Pentium G3258 @ 3.2GhzKingston ValueRAM 8GB DDR3 GeForce GTX 750 2GB GDDR5Western Digital WD10EZEX 1TBYou'll also need an existing Mac or PC to prepare the USB stick to be used for installation. There are guides and/or tools out there that allow for a doing so without a Mac, but I'm not sure about that myself. If you don't have an existing Mac, I recommend using a virtual machine image f…